Is one of your watchlist names on track for a big revenue surprise? If you closely monitor data on your watchlist and portfolio positions you may be one of the first to catch a big inflection in the data. But what if it happened with one of the 500 names in your investable universe – are your tracking data for everything at once?

 

As markets grow more efficient and competitive with more data-driven investors, it’s no longer enough to be right—you also need to be early, even if the company in question is not on your immediate radar. First movers often need bandwidth to cover a lot of data, and technology can help. Computers with modern processing power can scale human expertise and insight to apply it to vast amounts of data.

 

Humans can’t do it alone. Combing through millions of rows of data is unfeasible for time-constrained money managers. Certain tasks are best delegated to machines. This time constraint leaves investors to focus on details for a small range of tickers they cover. However, early inflections in data can present attractive opportunities for investors, especially if detected immediately. Such detection can increase the scope of action beyond core portfolio positions into a wider watchlist.

 

Some of the largest investment managers in the world have built robust alerting systems on top of their existing data, with varying success. These systems catch triggers across a large swath of the market and then alert the investment team. The downside is that those systems can be costly to maintain, are hard to fine-tune to filter out the noise, and do not continuously operate well with newer, more specialized datasets. These systems are usually built by engineers who do not always speak the same language as PMs. Sometimes, nuance is lost in translation, resulting in less-than-ideal outcomes.

 

As time passes, even the initial build of a state-of-the-art internal system tends to become outdated, bloated, and cumbersome to navigate with onerous interfaces built by back-end engineers. They usually don’t cover all the edge cases investors may want, leading to frustration and weak adoption. As budgets change, support can fall by the wayside. Smaller managers are disadvantaged the most, struggling to monitor the sheer size of data their largest peers survey.

 

That is unless they leverage a technology partner who specializes in delivering a turnkey solution.

 

Thankfully, Maiden Century clients can lean on robust alerting technology built on top of the IDEA platform, which is widely trusted by the industry. The system has an intuitive interface, letting investors define their metrics, thresholds, and KPIs, with alerts across any desired inflection.

 

Our philosophy when building this functionality was simple: a great alerting system should be flexible and customizable, empowering investors to define their own alerts based on the data and the KPIs they care most about.

 

How do you spot inflections?

Tell us what you think makes for a great alert, we’d love to hear from you.